BIOGRAPHY

Sladen, Douglas B. W., ed. Australian Poets 1788-1888: Being a Selection of Poems Upon All Subjects Written in Australia and New Zealand During the First Century of the British Colonization. New York: Cassell Publishing Company, 1890, 612 p.

Reprints selections from the poetry of Adam Lindsay Gordon, Henry Kendall, and many others, preceded by an introduction that deals mainly with Kendall and Gordon.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Miller, E. Morris. Australian Literature From Its Beginnings to 1935: A Descriptive and Bibliographical Survey of Books by Australian Authors in Poetry, Drama, Fiction, Criticism, and Anthology. Carlton, Victoria: Melbourne University Press, 1940, 1074 p.

Provides an extensive bibliography of primary and secondary sources arranged chronologically and by genre.

CRITICISM

Albinski, Nan. “A Survey of Australian Utopian and Dystopian Fiction.” Australian Literary Studies 13, no. 1 (May 1987): 15-28.

Examines Australian novels that feature lost world, utopian, xenophobic, or anti-scientific themes from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Ashcroft, Bill. “Africa and Australia: The Post-Colonial Connection.” Research in African Literatures 25, no. 3 (fall 1994): 161-69.

Considers certain social, linguistic, and literary affinities between post-colonial Australia and Africa.

Clark, Manning. “Tradition in Australian Literature.” In Twentieth Century Australian Literary Criticism, edited by Clement Semmler, pp. 38-44. Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1967.

Summarizes the characteristics of Australian literature as the product of a young, colonial society.

Conlon, Anne. “‘Mine Is a Sad Yet True Story’: Convict Narratives, 1818-1850.” Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society 55, no. 1 (March 1969): 43-82.

Surveys the lives and autobiographical writings of fifteen convicts sent to the Australian penal settlements in the first half of the nineteenth century.

Cooper, Roslyn Pesman. “Sir Samuel Griffith, Dante and the Italian Presence in Nineteenth-Century Australian Literary Culture.” Australian Literary Studies 14, no. 2 (October 1989): 199-215.

Follows the career of the Australian statesman and chief justice Sir Samuel Griffith, noted for his translation of Dante's Divina Commedia, and traces the influence of the Italian Risorgimento on several mid to late nineteenth-century Australian writers.

Dutton, Geoffrey. Snow on the Saltbush: The Australian Literary Experience. New York: Viking Penguin, 1984, 311 p.

Presents an historical and cultural study of the development of Australian writing, reading audiences, and publishing practices in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Gibson, Ross. “Ocean Settlement.” Meanjin 53, no. 4 (summer 1994): 665-78.

Summarizes the impetus and ideology of European colonial settlement in Australia.

Hergenhan, L. T. “The English Publication of Australian Novels in the Nineteenth Century: The Case of His Natural Life.” In Bards, Bohemians, and Bookmen: Essays in Australian Literature, edited by Leon Cantrell, pp. 56-71. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1976.

Recounts the difficulties associated with the publication of serialized Australian fiction in England, using the history of Marcus Clarke's His Natural Life as an example.

———, ed. The Penguin New Literary History of Australia. Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin Books, 1988, 620 p.

Includes articles on a range of subjects related to Australian literary history by various contributors, punctuated by several essays on shifting cultural perceptions of Australia and Australians.

Heseltine, H. P. “The Literary Heritage.” In On Native Grounds: Australian Writing from Meanjin Quarterly, edited by C. B. Christesen, pp. 3-15. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1968.

Highlights the principal subjects and themes that define the Australian literary tradition.

Jones, Dorothy. “Olivia and Chloe: Fictions of Female Friendship.” Australian Literary Studies 14, no. 1 (May 1989): 3-14.

Illuminates a rarely discussed feminine reinterpretation of the male-centered Australian concept of “mateship” expressed in the works of several women novelists.

Jordan, Richard D., and Peter Pierce. Introduction to The Poets' Discovery: Nineteenth-Century Australia in Verse, edited by Richard D. Jordan and Peter Pierce, pp. 1-17. Carlton, Victoria: Melbourne University Press, 1990.

Explores the vision of Australian poets, taking Adam Lindsay Gordon as a representative example, and comments on depictions of landscape, the Aborigine in verse, and the economic difficulties of being a poet in colonial Australia.

Jordens, Ann-Mari. The Stenhouse Circle: Literary Life in Mid-Nineteenth Century Sydney. Carlton, Victoria: Melbourne University Press, 1979, 186 p.

Considers the life of Nicol Drysdale Stenhouse, describing him as Australia's first and most significant patron of literature and a figure who dominated Sydney's intellectual circles in the 1850s and 1860s.

Kelly, Veronica. “Colonial ‘Australian’ Theatre Writers: Cultural Authorship and the Case of Marcus Clarke's ‘First’ Play.” Australian Literary Studies 18, no. 1 (May 1997): 31-44.

Assesses the intricacies and biases associated with a scholarly reconstruction of colonial Australian theatre and describes the difficulty of establishing authorship of Australian plays.

Kiernan, Brian. “The Australian Novel and Tradition.” In Images of Society and Nature: Seven Essays on Australian Novels, pp. 159-81. Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1971.

Discusses prior attempts to define an Australian literary tradition and relates the nineteenth- and twentieth-century Australian novel to the broader concerns of European fiction.

———. “Cultural Transmission and Australian Literature: 1788-1998.” In Studies in Australian Literary History, pp. 29-71. Sydney: Sydney Association for Studies in Society and Culture, 1997.

Traces the development of Australian poetry and fiction through the principal movements of modern European literature: Neoclassicism, Romanticism, Realism, and Modernism.

Leer, Martin. “Imagined Counterpart: Outlining a Conceptual Literary Geography of Australia.” In European Perspectives: Contemporary Essays on Australian Literature, edited by Giovanna Capone, pp. 1-13. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1991.

Regards Australian literature in relation to the geographical themes of Antipodean inversion and inland exploration.

Matthews, John Pengwerne. Tradition in Exile: A Comparative Study of Social Influences on the Development of Australian and Canadian Poetry in the Nineteenth Century. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962, 197 p.

Comparative evaluation of Australian and Canadian verse that emphasizes the creation of unique poetic idioms within these two Commonwealth nations.

Moore, T. Inglis. Social Patterns in Australian Literature. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971, 350 p.

Stresses the “significant patterns of thought, feeling, and behavior” represented in the works of Australian writers that distinguish Australian literature from that of other nations.

Morgan, Patrick. “Hard Work and Idle Dissipation: The Dual Australian Personality.” Meanjin 41, no. 1 (April 1982): 130-38.

Documents shifting representations of the “typical” Australian persona from the laconic and self-sufficient inhabitant of the bush in the late nineteenth century to the extroverted and indulgent suburbanite of the mid-twentieth century.

———. “Submerged Cultures in Australia.” Meanjin 47, no. 2 (winter 1988): 203-13.

Affirms the existence of suppressed cultural layers beneath those of the dominant, post-imperial Australian identity.

Nadel, George. Australia's Colonial Culture: Ideas, Men and Institutions in Mid-Nineteenth Century Eastern Australia. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1957, 295 p.

Characterizes the social, political, literary, intellectual, and religious atmosphere of colonial Australia.

Narasimhaiah, C. D., ed. An Introduction to Australian Literature. Brisbane: Jacaranda Press, 1965, 200 p.

Features numerous essays on the development of Australian literature and culture during the colonial period, as well as studies of twentieth-century Australian poetry and fiction.

Pana, Irina Grigorescu. “The Tomis Complex: Versions of Exile in Australian Literature.” World Literature Today 67, no. 3 (summer 1993): 523-32.

Observes themes of displacement in several works of Australian fiction.

Phillips, A. A. The Australian Tradition: Studies in Colonial Culture. Melbourne: F. W. Cheshire, 1958, 138 p.

Includes essays on the democratic theme in Australian literature and on the process of overcoming the artistic and intellectual restrictions of colonial domination.

Pierce, Peter. “How Australia's Literary History Might Be Written.” Australian Literary Studies 11, no. 1 (May 1983): 67-79.

Offers an ironic but optimistic assessment of Australian literary history.

Priessnitz, Horst. “The Bridled Pegaroo, or, Is There a Colonial Poetics of Intertextuality?” In European Perspectives: Contemporary Essays on Australian Literature, edited by Giovanna Capone, pp. 14-31. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1991.

Concentrates on the efforts of colonial Australian poets to write within an externally defined system of poetics.

Schaffer, Kay. Women and the Bush: Forces of Desire in the Australian Cultural Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988, 229 p.

Expounds a feminist critique of cultural and patriarchal presumptions within the Australian search for national identity.

Stewart, Ken. “The Support of Literature in Colonial Australia.” Australian Literary Studies 9, no. 4 (October 1980): 476-87.

Acknowledges the economic impediments faced by writers in colonial Australia while denying that conditions there, in terms of literary taste and financial support, were fundamentally different from those elsewhere.

White, Richard. Inventing Australia: Images and Identity 1688-1980. Sydney: George Allen & Unwin, 1981, 205 p.

Chronicles the development of Australian national and cultural distinctiveness and the imagery with which it was portrayed.

Wilkes, G. A. The Stockyard and the Croquet Lawn: Literary Evidence for Australian Cultural Development. Port Melbourne: Edward Arnold (Australia), 1981, 153 p.

Analyzes literary reflections and evocations of Australian cultural identity from European settlement to the early twentieth century.